The Yellow House

Broom’s book opens with a quote from the Jamaican poet Kei Miller who writes, “draw me a map of what you see then I will draw a map of what you never see and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose?” (17). Broom is interested in New Orleans as a place. Maps are only one way a place is constructed. Maps impose order on spaces to make them legible. To look at a map of New Orleans is to situate it in space. It is insufficient to describe New Orleans as one square mile consisting of “fifteen parallel, seven intersecting [streets], seventy-eight square blocks” (393). This small area is mapped and “nothing in this district is without an accompanying story, and there is no shortage of supporting evidence—anecdotal or otherwise” (393). Broom is interested in the places at the edges of the map, as her family home is literally left of the map. After Hurricane Katrina, the Yellow House and most of Eastern New Orleans are literally removed from the map.

While New Orleans East doesn’t fit into the mythology of New Orleans as it’s packaged and sold to tourists, Broom’s family does its own form of place-making. The importance of place and foundation is most literally expressed in the Yellow House. Simon adds new sections onto it to accommodate the expanding family. Years later after Katrina, Carl watches over the property like a sentinel. They are a family who make homes everywhere they go. This involves the physical space of a house and also community building. Broom writes that Amelia found a home with “these women, who lived in close proximity, composed a home. They were the real place—more real than the City of New Orleans—where Amelia resided” (32). The women in the family “love interiors” (109). Amelia, Ivory Mae, and Broom all create warm, welcoming spaces. However, the chaos of the Yellow House, a chaos compounded by poverty and unstable foundations, leads Ivory Mae and her kids to keep other people away out of shame. Broom writes that “by not inviting people in, we were going against our natures” (199). The complex links between home, place-making, and map-making are woven throughout the text.

Memory, myth, and history are prominent themes in The Yellow House. For example, the mythology of New Orleans is narrated through a selective reading of its history. This is a mythology of a “good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change” (429). Broom cannot locate her family’s experience in this history. The history of New Orleans doesn’t belong to them. She writes that this mythology “can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city” (429). It is a history for tourists that erases the challenging experiences of its citizens. Her New Orleans has:

ongoing corruption, a failing criminal justice and health system, poverty, education, and lack of economic possibilities that create for the average local the life-and-death nature of life lived in the city. A city where being held up while getting out of your car is the norm, where many children graduate from school without knowing how to spell, where neglected communities exist everywhere, sometimes a stone’s throw from overabundance (430).

Broom looks for evidence to ground her experiences in truer narratives than those offered by myth. She asks, “When you come from a mythologized place, as I do, who are you in that story?” (393). To answer this question, she consults public records, history books, photographs, and other archives, but she finds only fragments and absences. Instead, she turns to her family and interviews them, creating her own social history of New Orleans East. In doing so, Broom argues that the experience of her family is significant and that there are no peripheral or minor histories, just histories that have been overlooked. Often, the histories that aren’t written down are histories of Black and other marginalized communities. In this context, community memory is a significant tool of remembering. Broom writes a counter-history of New Orleans that shines a light onto things that are hidden.

When Broom tells her brother Simon about this book, he is worries that this excavation of memory “will disrupt, unravel, and tear down everything the Broom family has ever built. He would like, now, to live in the future and forget about the past” (24). He concludes by suggesting, “There is a lot we have subconsciously agreed that we don’t want to know” (24). Thus, memory is tightly linked to forgetting. As the youngest of 12 children, Broom feels the most disconnected from her family’s history, particularly because of the absence of her father.